The future of life-saving treatments may be just a chip off the ‘ole blood sample.
Scientists at Columbia University have created a set of real — and really tiny — human organs that interact on a chip, a “huge achievement” that could help test life-saving drugs.
Measuring about a millimeter in size each, project leader Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic and his team were able to forge an “engineered human heart, bone, liver and skin that are linked by vascular flow with circulating immune cells” on a device about the size of a microscope slide. The organs on the chip are both genetically and physically linked by a flow of immune cells between them, meaning they can mimic how the actual human body works.
Researchers say the cultured organs could soon be used to test how someone’s body will respond to various drug therapies — so doctors can be sure they’re providing the most personalized and effective treatment for each patient.
“This is a huge achievement for us,” said Vunjak-Novakovic in a statement, per South West News Service.
“After 10 years of research on organs-on-chips, we still find it amazing,” she continued. “The beating heart muscle, the metabolizing liver and the functioning skin and bone that are grown from the patient’s cells.”
A description of the chip was published in a cover story for the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering on Wednesday.
The long-awaited breakthrough provides a noninvasive template for real organ interactions, based on a real person’s own DNA, “function[ing] in a way that mimics responses you would see in the patient,” said study author Dr. Kacey Ronaldson-Bouchard.
“Providing communication between tissues while preserving their individual phenotypes has been a major challenge,” she said.
Observing the interaction of these organs was essential, rather than generating disconnected organs individually.
“In the body, each organ maintains its own environment, while interacting with other organs by vascular flow carrying circulating cells and bioactive factors,” Ronaldson-Bouchard explained. “So we chose to connect the tissues by vascular circulation while preserving each individual tissue niche that is necessary to maintain its biological fidelity, mimicking the way our organs are connected within the body.”
The reason these particular four organs were included on the chip concerns their disparate embryonic originals, structure and function. Each was developed in its own optimized compartments on the chip, separated by a thin endothelial barrier that would allow vascular circulation between them, particularly the exchange of monocytes and macrophages, immune cells that direct how tissues respond to external factors.
A simple blood sample deriving the patients’ own stem cells was used to grow their clone tissues in just four to six weeks.
Researchers had cancer drug testing in mind during trials — using doxorubicin, a chemotherapy, as an example during the study. Among its other side effects is the potential for cardiotoxicity, or damage to heart tissue caused by some form of toxin.
They compared the drug’s effects on the chip organs to reports from clinical studies of the same drug.
“Most notably, the multi-organ chip predicted precisely the cardiotoxicity and cardiomyopathy that often require clinicians to decrease therapeutic dosages of doxorubicin or even to stop the therapy,” said Vunjak-Novakovic, who previously made headlines when she showed that inert human organs could be revived by linking them to live pigs.
The potential uses in research and prognostics range broadly across a variety of systemic illnesses, including cancer and COVID-19 — areas that the Columbia University team continues to study, as well as developing a standardized, user-friendly chip so more doctors and scientists can get their hands on the tool.
“We are excited about the potential of this approach,” said Vunjak-Novakovic, noting it aims to understand how to attack disease “one patient at a time.”